Sounds like Bing uses just spell checking rather than n-grams on search queries as Google does.

That's a pretty big whole for Bing to miss. Probably doesn't track as well since it requires a mistyped query -- most people doing comparisons of relevance compare correctly typed queries. But a big hole for real world usage... at least I'd think so.

I can't tell if that whole is intentional.

You're query is irrelevant.

I agree. The first thing I would do, if writing a search engine, would be to do Google-style phrase corrections.

(Although lately, I find it too aggressive. When googling obscure error messages, it usually "do you mean"-s it into a less obscure error message that I already understand. Sigh.)

I really think Google is getting to be too clever for its own good. When I try to search for some Mac API, it will give me a blog post about an iPhone app, no matter how much I beg and plead. Bing returns precisely what I wanted for those "Where the heck did Google get that SERP from?" kind of queries.

Indeed. I think google might be falling into the trap of believing that the better search is the one with more results when in many, most?, cases the exact opposite is the case.

I tried a bunch of search engines the other day when I couldn't find something specific. Bing was the least useful: it generalized "dice" to "die" and then gave me lots of hits about death. It should have been fairly obvious that the articles returned had nothing to do with dice.

Interesting. If you use Bing from Germany (with German UI), it works correctly, i.e. suggests "How I won the war".

Which makes sense, as "water" is not a German word...